Astronaut Jack Schmitt Joins Skeptics

Richard Lindzen, Roy Spencer to address conference

American astronaut Dr. Jack Schmitt – the twelfth person to walk on the Moon, when he and Eugene Cernan were the last two to walk there – is the latest scientist to be added to the roster of more than 70 skeptics who will confront the subject of global warming at the second annual International Conference on Climate Change in New York City March 8-10, 2009.

The conference expects to draw 1,000 attendees including private-sector business people, state and federal legislators and officials, policy analysts, media, and students.

Schmitt, who earned a PhD from Harvard in geology, resigned in November from the Planetary Society, an international non-profit organization devoted to inspiring “the people of Earth to explore other worlds, understand our own, and seek life elsewhere.” He is the twelfth person to walk on the Moon; as of 2008, of the nine living moonwalkers, he and his crewmate Eugene Cernan were the last two to walk there.

“As a geologist, I love Earth observations,” Schmitt wrote, “But, it is ridiculous to tie this objective to a ‘consensus’ that humans are causing global warming when human experience, geologic data and history, and current cooling can argue otherwise. ‘Consensus,’ as many have said, merely represents the absence of definitive science. You know as well as I, the ‘global warming scare’ is being used as a political tool to increase government control over American lives, incomes and decision making…”

Schmitt will be joined by more than 70 other economists, public officials, legal experts, and climate specialists calling attention to new research that contradicts claims that Earth’s moderate warming during the 20th Century primarily was man-made and has reached crisis proportions.

Joseph Bast, president of The Heartland Institute, producer of the event along with more than 30 co-sponsors, explained, “At the first conference last March, we proved that the skeptics in the debate over global warming constitute the center or mainstream of the scientific community while alarmists are on the fringe.

“Now in the past nine months, the science has grown even more convincing that global warming is not a crisis. Also suggesting this ‘crisis’ is over are opinion polls in the U.S. and around the globe and political events, including the decisive defeat of ‘cap-and-trade’ legislation in the U.S. Senate last spring. The crisis has been cancelled by sound science and common-sense.”

Headliners among the 70-plus presenters will be:

* William Gray, Colorado State University, leading researcher into tropical weather patterns.

* Richard Lindzen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the world’s leading experts in dynamic meteorology, especially planetary waves.

* Stephen McIntyre, primary author of Climate Audit, a blog devoted to the analysis and discussion of climate data. He is a devastating critic of the temperature record of the past 1,000 years, particularly the work of Michael E. Mann, creator of the infamous “hockey stick” graph. That graph–thoroughly discredited in scientific circles–supposedly proved that mankind is responsible for a sharp increase in greenhouse gases.

* Arthur Robinson, curator of a global warming petition signed by more than 32,000 American scientists, including more than 10,000 with doctorate degrees, rejecting the alarmist assertion that global warming has put the Earth in crisis and is caused primarily by mankind.

* Willie Soon, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

* Roy Spencer, University of Alabama at Huntsville, principal research scientist and team leader on NASA’s Aqua satellite..

A partial list of confirmed speakers appears below.

Dan Miller, executive vice president of The Heartland Institute, a 24-year-old national nonpartisan think-tank based in Chicago, said, “All of the event’s expenses will be covered by admission fees and individual and foundation donors to Heartland. No corporate dollars earmarked for the event were solicited or accepted.”

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